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How Low Can You Go? Lesson From the Dark Side

The novelist David Lozell Martin’s achy-breaky new memoir, “Losing Everything,” was written before Lehman Brothers, before WaMu and before television viewers had memorized every contour of Hank Paulson’s shaved head — before, that is, the American economy collapsed and so many lives began spinning on patches of black ice.

But Mr. Martin’s plain-spoken account of what it’s like to be stripped of everything — his spouse, his writing career, his farm, his money, his health, his dignity and eventually his sanity — may mean a lot to some people who are struggling right now. It’s a bruising survival story.

“Losing Everything” is not a tidy, perfectly stitched account of depression or a crackup, like William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” or Andrew Solomon’s “Noonday Demon.” Mr. Martin is not that kind of writer. He’s a blue-collar guy with a rowdy side, and his expletive-filled prose arrives at your door as if dressed in scuffed boots and Carhartts, ready to clean out your liquor cabinet and crank up the stereo.

Those boots will leave mud on your floor. He is not as gifted a writer as Harry Crews or Larry Brown or Stephen King, but his stuff will put you in mind of all three writers. He keeps you wincing and turning the pages in a way that some finer writers do not.

“I owned a farm in West Virginia with my wife and we lived there 12 years,” Mr. Martin writes in his book’s Isak Dinesen-like first sentence. He calls them “the best years of my life.” Mr. Martin and his wife kept chickens and geese and cattle and ducks. He wrote novels. She tended to their many horses. Their only worry was that “one day someone from the Department of Responsible Adulthood would drive up our lane to tell us we had to stop playing around out in the country and go back to the city to get jobs like Responsible Adults.”

Trouble, when it arrives, seems to come fast and from every direction, like the zombies in the film “28 Days Later.” “Between Easter and Christmas of 2003, I lost everything,” Mr. Martin writes. What took it all “was not alcohol or drugs, it was life itself, a potent combination of bad decisions, rotten luck, a debilitating lawsuit and outlandish adultery ... eventually involving gunplay, law enforcement, divorce, cancer and at least one dramatic rush to the emergency room. At a distance of five years, I’m still trying to make sense of what happened.”

Before Mr. Martin, 62, unspools the details of his annus horribilis, he describes his equally unsettling childhood. He grew up in Granite City, Ill. and later on a farm with a father, a steelworker, whose occasional fits of rage led him to nearly kill his wife one evening while Mr. Martin, then age 12, watched. For her part, Mr. Martin’s mother was clinically insane. She was once found wandering naked in their city’s downtown; on another occasion she tried to have sex with the author when he was 14. Mr. Martin, scared of both of them, began to sleep with a butcher knife under his bed. His mother was eventually committed to an asylum.

Photo

David Lozell MartinCredit
Laura Lucs

Mr. Martin saw little in his own future beyond steelwork. He was saved, he recalls in this memoir’s most buoyant chapter (it is titled “I Wish I Had Drunk More Gin”), by alcohol. “I’m not saying that gin saved my life,” he writes, “but I am saying that, without the gin dreams of being a writer, I might never have become a writer.”

He discovered beer first. “I would write sonnets to that beer,” he declares. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I and beer had never liberated that storytelling voice” in the back of his mind.

Gin sometimes made Mr. Martin act badly and led to horrific blackouts on freeways, but it also, he notes, “put me into bed with beautiful and crazy women.” Mr. Martin’s early success as a writer (his novels include “The Crying Heart Tattoo” and “The Beginning of Sorrows”) also made him arrogant, he admits, and prone to affairs. His first marriage, to a woman who wanted a tame, suburban husband, ended in divorce.

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No matter what happened, Mr. Martin writes, gin “took me back with juniper kisses.” So what if he sometimes went too far? “Craziness,” he says, “was the family business.”

He met his second wife and settled down. All was well on the farm in West Virginia until the money started to run out. Mr. Martin had switched from writing literary novels to writing thrillers, and he was more successful then ever. Until he wasn’t anymore.

“We were fine as long as we were poor,” he writes. But later, they did not have the sense to pull back and “live poor again.” They kept racking up the credit card debt, awaiting the next big score that never came.

They sold the farm and, in a kind of self-imposed exile, moved in quick succession to Florida and then Saratoga Springs and then Tennessee. In retrospect, Mr. Martin probably should have realized all was not well with his marriage when one day, as he and his wife were cutting brush along a fence line in Tennessee, she said to him, “I have an overwhelming desire to bury this machete in the back of your head.”

Before long she has had an affair, his writing career bottoms out and he is found to have diabetes. He shaves his head and comes close to committing suicide. He is saved by his adult son’s voice on the telephone saying, “Dad, I need you.” Soon Mr. Martin is living with that son and his wife and on the slow road to recovering his mental health. There are darkly funny bits amid the bad mess here. About suicide, Mr. Martin writes, “Life is so short that killing yourself is like falling out of an airplane without a parachute and then, on the way down, you blow your brains out.” There is this promising chapter title: “Looking for Work With a Shaved Head and a Twenty-Year Gap in the Résumé.” There is a mantra he discovers for when things look as if they can’t get any worse: “At least we don’t own a monkey.” And there is a scene involving a dangerously constipated Mr. Martin and an emergency-room doctor that is so graphic and disgusting that laughter is the only option.

I wish Mr. Martin had left out the self-help bromides he sprinkles into “Losing Everything.” He sinks pretty low toward the end, writing (oh, please, no) things like “Never lose a sense of wonderment” and “Take pleasure in small things.” For the most part, his book is better than that. And the next time I’m feeling down about some aspect of my life, I’ll keep in mind that at least I don’t own a monkey.

LOSING EVERYTHING

By David Lozell Martin

201 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page C15 of the New York edition with the headline: How Low Can You Go? Lesson From the Dark Side. Today's Paper|Subscribe